Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet
Kentucky Arts Council

Lexington Writer is Arts Council’s
Featured Artist for March, April

FRANKFORT, Ky. (March 7, 2018) — Crystal Wilkinson of Lexington has been selected as the Kentucky Arts
Council’s Featured Artist for March and April.

Wilkinson, a poet who has written three award-winning novels, received a Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Individual Artist
Fellowship for literary arts in 1997.

“My writing is rooted in the rural experience and all its complexities, anchored in the landscape itself. I write with an
eye and ear on the curative powers nature holds in black lives both historical and contemporary,” Wilkinson said. “Black
Appalachians are invisible to a generation that wrongly sometimes conflates ‘black’ with ‘urban’ and ‘white’ with ‘Appalachian.’ I
want readers to see us, hear us and, in the process, learn something about themselves.”

Wilkinson’s tenure as Featured Artist will include April, National Poetry Month, the celebrated birth month of American
Poet Laureate and Kentucky native Robert Penn Warren, who was born April 24. That day is traditionally celebrated as Kentucky Writers’ Day.

To learn more about Wilkinson, visit the arts council's website. The featured artist’s page includes a story about Wilkinson
and contact information for the artist.

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The
Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, fosters environments for Kentuckians to value,
participate in and benefit from the arts. Kentucky Arts Council funding is provided by the
Kentucky General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts.